Score: A Film Music Documentary

For a
subliminal art form, film music demands phenomenal manpower and resources of
time. Yet on occasion as many as ninety musicians are brought together to
enhance one emotional moment. For Doctor
Zhivago, Maurice Jarre employed 110 musicians to stamp home his orchestral character.
However, a film score is often just an afterthought, something added once the
cameras have rolled and the footage tweaked in the editing room. For James
Cameron, this essential stage of the filmmaking process is postponed until the eleventh
hour, at the moment when he has to convey to the composer what he’s had in his head
for months. For others, an orchestra is brought in at the last minute to
sight-read a score they’ve never even seen before.

Film music
is such an enormous subject matter that a single documentary may seem a little paltry.
Even so, the writer-director Matt Schrader seems to have corralled the lion’s
share of Hollywood’s film music community, along with a slew of clips
highlighting the greatest moments of cinema, from the shower scene in Psycho and the attack of the shark in Jaws, to indelible moments from Rocky and E.T. The ExtraTerrestrial. Indeed, there’s enough here to feed a
whole series of documentaries – yet key composers and scores are overlooked. 'The
Harry Lime Theme' from The Third Man?
Nope. The entire romantic oeuvre of Francis Lai? Nope. Anything at all by
Maurice Jarre? Nothing.

Even that
standard of film themes, Rocky, which
kick-starts the documentary, goes uncredited (Bill Conti is our man, who went
on to win an Oscar for The Right Stuff).
There is an entire section on Thomas Newman (The Shawshank Redemption, American Beauty, Finding Nemo), but the
composer himself only gets to offer a one-off soundbite. Neither do we get a
chance to meet John Williams, although his praises are sung by a chorus of
admirers (including Steven Spielberg in an old interview). On the other hand,
John Debney (The Passion of the Christ,
The Jungle Book, The Greatest Showman) crops up so often that one suspects
he may be a co-producer (he isn’t). There are a handful of interesting
anecdotes (Alfred Newman’s theme for 20th Century Fox turns out to
be a recycled outtake), but not enough to grab the casual viewer by the lapels.
Film buffs, though, and particularly those into modern movies, will find much
to relish.